Comment by muyuu
2 months ago
I think the "Mythos" name is genius. The people at Anthropic make a bunch of claims and the public is expected to just believe them without any possibility of testing those claims or reproducing those results, and since so many people are invested in this saviour for the Global economy, or in the industry in general, or in hype to feed their engagement-based income sources, then there is faith to spare.
Meanwhile this mythical beast wasn't able to prevent the Bun vulnerability that exposed their code, let alone precluding the need to acquire that IP in the first place for presumably hundreds of millions of $$$, instead of coding a better replacement or a solution of its own.
What is real and measurable is that subscription plan users are getting a much degraded service for the same money through both open and hidden policies, while Anthropic moves compute to serve off-the-counter customers. The same people who come with the most obvious and brazen lies to dismiss the clear degradation of their service also come with this "security" justification for a move that looks just like good old market segmentation which would perfectly fit the strong symptoms that they cannot afford to offer tokens at a competitive price in this market.
One very clever consequence of Anthropic's guarded release of the Mythos model is that they've kind of claimed the position of best in class here, and also positioned themselves as the responsible vendor in this space in one fell swoop.
OpenAI pulled the same trick with GPT3. It's amazing how well it's working judging by the comments I'm hearing from people I know exist. Because out there on social media, who knows.
Well said. I really hope the Chinese models keep getting better. Competition is good.
There are two possibilities:
a) Anthropic is lying, and every company that is collaborating on vulnerability squishing project is an accomplice in this big lie b) Anthropic has then goldest gold of the shovels to sell to people, which is actually useful for enterprises
Everyone, including Ant, understands that other companies will catch up in terms of model strength. So it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position wrt releasing it to the public.
The model is probably legitimately better. But it might not be enough better to justify the extra cost of inference.
They know if they released it publicly, people will be able to see exactly how smart it is, and adjust their demand correspondingly. Anthropic will either need to price it high enough that nobody uses it (and the hardware is sitting mostly idle to servicing a few customers), or lower their profit margins (potentially below cost) to price it fairly.
So instead, they bundle it with this fancy new exploit finding scaffold, and sell the combined it to enterprise customers. I bet the scaffold works fine with smaller models, but gets notably improved results with Mythos.
The two products support each-other, and with the exclusive bundle Anthropic can get more profit selling both together than they would get selling them individually.
And as an added bonus, people over estimate the capability of this unreleased model, providing hype for Anthropic.